I am deeply disappointed in the coward, tactical stupidity, and utter uselessness of the eight Democratic senators who caved in and gave the Republicans everything they wanted after a 40-day standoff. They got no concessions at all, not even a promise of a future vote on funding health care again (for whatever that’s worth).
Angus King (update: apparently he’s an independent, the first source I got this from was wrong), Tim Kaine, John Fetterman, Dick Durbin, Maggie Hasan, Jeanne Shaheen, Catherine Matso, and Jacky Rosen, and also Chuck Schumer who coordinated this: fuck you very much, you spineless worms.
Every single one of them was already not going to seek re-election so they personally had nothing to lose — but it undermines confidence in the party for future elections, and it undermines the recently demonstrated knowledge that we all knew the shutdown was Republicans’ fault all along. Editorials are popping up from furloughed forest rangers who’ve been living in their cars, people who were losing their SNAP benefits, etc. that they wanted Democrats to keep fighting, not render this entire thing moot. Shaheen’s daughter, herself a politician, was calling for standing firm a couple of days ago and now has publicly disagreed with her mom’s decision. I will note that the big victories last Tuesday were not brought about by the centrists and fossils of the party, but by progressives and by outraged, engaged voters who properly appreciate what’s at stake.
Yet another example of how we live in the stupidest timeline.
Now, there’s still some debate and amendments and more voting in the Senate… and then it goes to the House. Which means Johnson has to finally reopen the House. Which means Adelita Grijalva finally gets sworn in, and adds the 218th signature to the discharge petition which triggers a vote to release the Epstein files. Which is all well and good… but this would have happened inevitably anyway.
Meanwhile, people will lose their healthcare coverage, and will suffer and die needlessly. Remember the “death panels” scare when public healthcare was being debated? …yeah.
I’ve decided to quite caffeine cold turkey, at least for a bit, to see if that helps. No coffee, no soda with caffeine, no tea except herbal. The anxiety stuff and what I believe are physical side effects of it are really kicking my ass, and caffeine definitely does play with anxiety. Except during my worst previous round of anxiety in 2020, I had a habit of maybe a couple of cups of coffee and a couple of Coke Zeros per day with seemingly no ill effects, although maybe they were just not bad enough to notice. Sometimes caffeine will fix a headache or give me an energy boost, but mostly it’s just a habit. So far today’s been a bad one for anxiety anyway, but let’s just not compound the problem.
On a more positive note, I’ve finished recording Kintsugi, which will be my sixth release for the year. The entire theme is about piecing together broken shards. Of course there’s the philosophical side of kintsugi, which I find particularly appropriate both personally and nationally right now, and “broken but beautiful” describes a lot of the timbres and textures that I enjoy. But there were many separate recording sessions where I’d just create a single drone, or a simple sequence or something to loop. These were put together with a little extra material, to make 14 individual named parts. After mastering I’m going to merge those to three final tracks, totaling a bit under an hour.